Windows 10 & 11 · Free & open source
Everything went through WhatsApp. Nothing came out of it.
The quote, the address, the photograph of the damage, the delivery note, the yes — every one of them arrived in a chat and stayed there, scrolling a little further out of reach each day. WhatsBackUp keeps all of it on your own disk, then gathers the conversations into projects and the photographs into albums, so picking a job back up means opening one project instead of searching three chats and a phone.
No account · No subscription · No administrator password
available045
available050
Nothing recovers them. Something should have kept them.
§ 01 The losses
Six ways your photographs leave without telling you
None of them look like a disaster at the time. That is precisely why nobody acts until they go looking for something and it isn't there.
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01
WhatsApp deletes media from its servers
Open a chat from two years ago and the photo is a grey box: no longer available. It isn't on your phone either, because you never opened it in time.
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02
A new phone loses what the backup missed
Restores skip media, run out of cloud space, or quietly fail halfway. People find this out on day one of the new phone, which is the worst possible day.
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03
"Free up space" doesn't ask which ones mattered
One tap clears eight gigabytes of photographs. It does not distinguish between a meme and the only picture you have of your grandmother's kitchen.
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04
Exporting a chat is not an archive
WhatsApp's own export caps the media it includes, must be repeated conversation by conversation, and hands you a zip file that gets buried in Downloads.
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05
The proof you need is buried in a chat
The delivery photo, the damaged part, the signed page, the meter reading. Scrolling two years back on a phone to find one picture is not an archive, it's an ordeal.
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06
Nothing is searchable
Thousands of files called
IMG-20240817-WA0043.jpg, in one undifferentiated pile, ordered only by the date they happened to arrive.
§ 02 Setting up
Three steps, then you can forget about it
It links to your phone exactly the way WhatsApp Web does — one QR code, once. After that it simply runs.
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01
Install it
One installer, nothing to set up first. No Node, no Chrome, no developer tools, and no administrator password — it installs for your user alone.
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02
Scan the code
On your phone: WhatsApp → Settings → Linked devices → Link a device. The flow you already know from WhatsApp Web.
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03
Walk away
Every photo and video you send or receive lands in your folder as it arrives. One click also pulls in what is already sitting in your chats.
§ 03 Making sense of it
A record you can actually work from
Any backup left alone is a list in date order, which is barely better than the phone it came from. Switch sorting on and the archive reads itself: conversations gather under the job they belong to, photographs fall into albums it names, and the whole thing becomes searchable by what is in it rather than what it was called.
Before
- IMG-20240817-WA0043.jpg
- IMG-20240817-WA0044.jpg
- IMG-20240818-WA0001.jpg
- VID-20240818-WA0002.mp4
- IMG-20240819-WA0007.jpg
- IMG-20240819-WA0008.jpg
- IMG-20240820-WA0011.jpg
- IMG-20240821-WA0003.jpg
- … 420 more
After
- Deliveries · 131
- pallet on the loading bay
- signed delivery note, 18 Aug
- Machine repairs · 45
- cracked bearing housing
- part number plate, close up
- Paperwork · 64
- invoice 2024-0871
- Products · 75
Before
- Site — Rue Haute
- +32 478 55 12 09
- Bram (plumber)
- Kitchen group
- +32 495 71 40 33
- Tiles — showroom
- … 203 more
After
- Rue Haute refit · 5 conversations
- Site — Rue Haute
- Bram (plumber)
- Tiles — showroom
- The van · 2 conversations
- +32 478 55 12 09
- Suppliers · 11 conversations
- +32 495 71 40 33
- One place per job
- A project holds the conversations that belong to it, and the album beside it holds what was photographed — the damage, the meter reading, the signed note. What took three chats and a scroll takes one screen.
- Search stops being about filenames
- Ask for the invoice with 0871 on it and it finds the photograph, because it read the number off the paper.
- Corrections stick
- Rename an album, move a photograph, take one out entirely — the next sort is told what you did and works around it, rather than undoing it.
- Your key, your choice of provider
- Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, NVIDIA, OpenRouter, Groq — or Ollama and LM Studio on your own machine, which cost nothing and send nothing anywhere.
- Priced before a penny is spent
- Around 50 cents to sort six hundred photographs and two hundred conversations on Gemini's cheapest model — and nothing at all on its free tier. The run is priced before it starts, against a monthly limit you set. Exactly what it sends →
§ 04 What it does
Built to be left running
The whole point is that you stop thinking about it. That takes rather more than a download button.
- Everything, as it arrives
- Photos and videos you send and receive, in one-to-one chats and groups, saved the moment they land — with message text kept in a searchable local database.
- Straight into your cloud folder
- Point it at pCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox or a network drive and videos are written there directly, so your existing client syncs them off the PC without a second copy.
- Catches up on history
- Import history walks your existing chats and downloads the media WhatsApp still holds — frequently years of photographs you had assumed were gone.
- Says so when it breaks
- WhatsApp changes its website without warning. Three failed downloads in a row and the tray icon turns amber and the app tells you — rather than failing silently for a month.
- Plays without opening anything
- Videos show a frame in the grid and play silently as your pointer crosses them. Quick play runs them one after another, full screen, the way a feed does — sound on when you want it.
- Finds the one you need
- Filter by chat, date, sent or received. With sorting on, search by what is actually pictured, including text read off a label or an invoice.
- Yours, and only yours
- No account, no server of ours, no telemetry. Ordinary files in ordinary folders that keep working if this project disappears tomorrow.
§ 05 Specification
The short version
- What it is
- A Windows desktop app that archives WhatsApp media and message text to your own PC
- Price
- Free, and open source. No account, no subscription, no limits
- Runs on
- Windows 10 and Windows 11, 64-bit
- Needs first
- Nothing. No Node.js, no Chrome, no developer tools, no administrator password
- Download
- 237 MB — it carries its own browser engine
- Saves
- Photos, videos and message text. Optionally documents, voice notes, audio and stickers
- Stored as
- Ordinary JPG and MP4 files in ordinary folders, plus a standard SQLite database
- Cloud folders
- pCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive desktop, or any mapped network drive
- Sends data away
- No — except optional AI sorting, off by default, using your own API key
- Sorting cost
- About $1.50 for a few hundred photographs, or nothing with a local model
- Official WhatsApp app
- No — independent and unofficial, not affiliated with WhatsApp LLC or Meta
§ 06 Disclosure
Three things that don't flatter us
You are about to let a stranger's software read your messages. You should hear the awkward parts from us, not discover them later.
- This is not an official WhatsApp app. It connects the way WhatsApp Web does, through an open-source library WhatsApp does not endorse. Their terms do not permit unofficial clients, and there is a real if small chance an account gets limited or banned for using one. If that risk is unacceptable to you, don't install it.
- It archives other people's media too. Everything sent to you is kept, and none of the senders agreed to that. Keep the copies to yourself, and delete what you shouldn't be holding.
- It only captures while it is running. Anything arriving with the app closed is missed at the time — though Import history can usually collect it afterwards.
§ 07 Obtain
Take a copy
Free, open source, and about five minutes from here to every photograph I am sent is now kept.
FileWhatsBackUp-Setup-1.2.1.exe
Size237 MB
RequiresWindows 10 / 11, 64-bit
Installsper user — no admin password
Licenceopen source, free
The full installation guide, including the Windows SmartScreen warning →
§ 08 Questions
What people ask first
Does it cost anything?
No. Free and open source — no account, no subscription, no limits. The only thing that can ever cost money is the optional sorting, which uses your own key with the provider you choose: roughly $1.50 for a few hundred photographs, or nothing at all with a model on your own PC.
Does it upload my messages anywhere?
No. No account, no server of ours, no telemetry. Files go to your folders and your own cloud folder. The single exception is AI sorting, which is off until you switch it on, shows you the literal data before the first call, and can be pointed at a model on your own machine so nothing leaves it.
Will this get my WhatsApp account banned?
It is a real if small risk, and we won't pretend otherwise. It uses an unofficial client library, which WhatsApp's terms don't permit. It behaves like an ordinary linked device, sends no messages and automates nothing — but the risk isn't zero. If your account is critical to your livelihood, weigh that first.
Can it get back photographs I've already lost?
Sometimes. Import history pulls in whatever is still in your chats, often years of it. But once a file is gone from both WhatsApp's servers and your phone, no tool recovers it — this one included. Which is the entire argument for running it before you need it.
Why is Windows warning me about the installer?
Because it isn't signed with a paid certificate — several hundred euros a year that a free tool doesn't have. SmartScreen shows that warning for anything it doesn't recognise; it says nothing about whether the software is safe. Click More info, then Run anyway. Or read the source and build it yourself.